From business area to computer area, entity interaction is widely existing in the real world, such as, the commercial actions among businesses, governments, customers, the communication among computers and/or servers, or the invocations among software components, etc. Here, the entities can be business entities, IT system or components, etc. For different purposes, people need to model entities and their interaction relationship. Especially, it often occurs in the following fields: business process integration, enterprise application integration, software development, computer protocol design, etc.
For the above purposes, there has been proposed a number of solutions, including some visualizing and modeling methods and tools. They can be basically classified into the following categories:
.UML Activity Diagram and its variants, as shown in FIG. 1, Activity Diagram allows using swim lanes to model multiple entities and using data flows across lane boundary and objects to model the interaction among entities. It's a method of modeling entity behavior. It has the following drawbacks: it cannot model the data mapping and fusion relation; its swim lanes only allow containing flowchart, but not other ways of modeling the internal logics of entities, such as state diagram; it cannot model entity interface and entity interaction; it cannot reduce unnecessary lanes and only show major entities on demand.
.UML Collaboration Diagram and its variants, as shown in FIG. 2, Collaboration Diagram can model the interaction of multiple entities as a network. Each entity is a node of the network. The links among entities represent the interaction, and the interaction order can also be marked on links. Collaboration Diagram considers the entity as a black box, screens its internal logic and only shows the major message transfers among entities. This brings its major drawbacks: the audience cannot intuitively know how the sending message affects the entity's internal logic, why and how the entity sends out such a response message; it cannot model the data mapping and fusion relation.
.UML Sequence Diagram and its variants, as shown in FIG. 3, Sequence Diagram models each entity as an interface and clearly presents the interaction sequence. It also considers entity as a black box. Its major drawbacks are basically similar with Collaboration Diagram.
Therefore, it is desired to visualize the complex interaction relationship among entities in an intuitive graphic way and model homogeneous or heterogeneous presentation manner and interaction logic for the internal logics of entities in a unified way.